This is a hybrid meeting;
- Join us in person at Knox Presbyterian Church (Lisgar & Elgin) in Geneva Hall. Please use the Garden Entrance on Elgin Street. Limited free street parking is available on Saturdays, and the City Hall Parking Garage is available for $2.00.
- Join online by registering here. This registration covers both events.
Holiday Social / 9 a.m.
Great Moments in Genealogy / 10 a.m.
Purleigh’s Brick Walls: Discovering the Brotherhood Colony in Purleigh, Essex
This presentation reveals a happy moment when Veronica determined that her great-grandfather, Walter Birtles, and his young family joined the Brotherhood Colony in Essex in 1897. There was a further great moment when she learned of the link between the colony and the immigration of the Doukhobors to western Canada in 1899.
Veronica Scrimger is a retired librarian and telecommunications product manager. She has spent the last 9 years ‘walking in the footsteps' of numerous ancestors, both her own and her husband's. She intends to write about two or three of them for Anglo-Celtic Roots in the next few years.
A Bible Hunt, with another stone house at the end!
Beth Adams got hooked on genealogy when her Aunt Charlotte took her and her mother to visit the Betts House in Pickering. The house was fantastic—but the family bible Myra got out to show them was the clincher! Inside that bible was a typewritten transcript of the family pages from an even older bible! That began a 30-year search for Aaron’s bible.
Beth Adams has been interested in family history since her teens. Her late mother used to say she raised her children in nursing homes. Beth didn’t mind as she enjoyed the family stories and photos. She has been checking out the facts and sharing the stories ever since. Beth is a retired teacher who taught in inner-city Toronto for 31 years. She has retired to Pembroke with her husband, Hal. She volunteers at the local museum, genealogy groups, and with Scouts Canada, and spends as much time as she can at the family cottage with her sons and friends.
It Could Have Been a Movie: Charles Roper & His Fiddle
A family story of a relative who sailed the seas, played the troops into battle with a fiddle made of a tin and also played for the Prince of Wales.
Fact or fiction or the plot line for a movie? During the isolation of Covid, Nancy, as the family historian, received an envelope of miscellaneous papers belonging to her late mother, which contained a picture of a Charles Roper standing on a table playing a violin, along with an unattributed newspaper article about this event. With time on her hands and the digital world at her fingertips, Nancy set out to discover the fact or fiction. This is the story of her great-grandfather’s eldest brother, Charles Roper, his adventures on the high seas and the people she met while uncovering his story.
Nancy Higgins is retired from IBM after a long consulting career. She now enjoys spending her time as family historian and indulging her passion for floral design. Nancy is related to three British home children and the proud descendant of two, her paternal grandmother and grandfather. Now residing in BC, she is thankful for the silver lining of Covid that allows her to continue her active membership in BIFHSGO. She looks forward to the day when her research is organized and in the meanwhile derives pleasure from the journey of discovering her roots and creating family stories to share.